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To: SunkenCiv

AHuh. Well a bit premature. But certainly not unlikely that someday some really radical jihadists will want to blow them up, as they did the “false idols” of the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan.


3 posted on 05/04/2007 9:51:22 AM PDT by Paul Ross (Ronald Reagan-1987:"We are always willing to be trade partners but never trade patsies.")
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To: Paul Ross

A medieval caliph tried to demolish the Giza pyramids because they were products of the Time of Ignorance (believe it or not, that’s the Moslem term for the time before Islam). He had his crews start with Mycerinus, the smallest of the three large ones there (there are some, by comparison, tiny ones around the plateau; if they were by themselves, they’d be pretty impressive). They worked for months, and the damage they did by hauling away stone shows, but the estimated time to destroy even the small one showed that the process of demolition of all three would take perhaps a century. So the caliph called it off.

Also during the Moslem period, the smoothing face stones were removed from the pyramids in order to build various structures in Cairo. As late as the 19th century, the somewhat obscure Abu Roash pyramid (built, or at least begun, by Khufu’s son and successor, Djedjefre) was still providing building stone for Cairo. It may have been abandoned work (Khafre, Djedjefre’s brother, built the number two pyramid at Giza), but clearly was cannibalized for over 4000 years by later people in search for construction materials.


9 posted on 05/04/2007 10:04:52 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (I last updated my profile on Thursday, May 3, 2007. https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
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